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Railway Model Making with Laser Cutter

Hello. Mr. Nobuaki Ishii who met us at JAM convention (International railway model convention) held at Tokyo Big Sight has come to our head office!

Mr. Ishii has been making Railway Model for 50 years since 14 years old. He brought his works and told about their frameworks.

Although it is hard to recognize, laser cutter was used for his works overall. It is surprising that they are very carefully crafted even small parts!

When he made the joist and the door in the photo above, he cut plywood out with laser beam machine like the photo below, and laminated them to make asperity.

Rail cars were made with cut paper lamination, 3D printer, thin corded brass and so on. The texture of the surface and the proper reproduction of lamination are excellent.

To more surprise, here is plants in the model. Those were real ones, which were collected and put up preserved flowers.

The story of planning stage is also quite interesting.

All the models in the photo below reproduces actual railways in Akita prefecture in 1950’s to 60’s at a 1/48 size.

Unsurprisingly there is no manual about their assembling, so that he tried to find information from the past literature. Then, he designed parts after calculated actual dimensions from photos he found.

The three pieces of photos in the below are taken by Mr. Ishii. They are so realistic that it is difficult to recognize whether real or model, isn’t it?

Mr. Ishii used our laser cutter in the better way than we imagined.

He told that he asked a service provider for laser cut until he introduced FABOOL Laser Mini, but it is of valuable help to have an own laser cutter which is desk-sized for remade something or increase in the same part . In addition, he said that the craftsmanship has definitely been changed by laser cutter.